Jaromir Jagr, the Keith Richards of hockey, is the only active player who’s actually survived all four of the NHL’s attempts to do itself in through work stoppages, which doesn’t mean it gets any easier, even for one of the sport’s lions.

Can a team really start training camp on Sunday and be ready for its first game six days later?

“Not really,” Jagr says, smiling, clamping a large hand on his inquisitor’s shoulder.

Lately, it’s especially difficult for Jagr, and not just because he’s 40. For the fifth time — six if you count the three years he played in Russia, when he thought his NHL career was done — he’s starting over. He’s a new guy on a new team, one remaking itself into something that remains unclear at this point.

Jagr needs more than five days of practice with his new teammates. He needs to know where they like the puck and when. He needs the conversations on the ice, in the room. He needs to get a feel for their instincts.

He needs to introduce himself to Jamie Benn.

Fortunately for the Stars, Jagr doesn’t need a lot of time to ingratiate himself. He played just the one season for the Flyers, last year, and it happened to be the best that either of his linemates, Claude Giroux and Scott Hartnell, ever had.

They would not call it a coincidence.

“Jags plays different than anybody else in the league,” Hartnell told Philly reporters this week. “He’s so strong on that puck.

“I think he thinks three plays ahead of almost everybody else on the ice.”

And what does Jagr think it’ll be like, starting the season with seven games in 11 days after a week of training camp?

“Some of these games are not gonna be very pretty,” he says. “There’s gonna be for sure more fighting, more fighting than playing.”

Other possible fallout: The old guys may suffer the most.

The last time the NHL played a 48-game schedule, in 1994-95, Jagr and Eric Lindros tied for the league lead with 70 points. Both were under 25 at the time. Before that short season, three of the top four scorers — Wayne Gretzky, Adam Oates and Doug Gilmour — were all over 30.

The compressed schedule, a truncated training camp, an increased emphasis on winning every single game, especially early, would seem to favor youth.

On the geezers’ side: A shorter schedule should leave them fresher for the playoffs.

Of course, that’s assuming the Stars even make the postseason, which is no longer a given in Dallas. Jagr will eventually make himself comfortable, but the Stars will have a hard time winning without Benn. If the first 10 games in a short season can nearly determine a playoff contender, as Jagr says, every game Benn misses is all the more costly.

Whether it’s the lockout or the team missing its best player, it’s one crisis after another. For Jagr, it’s also personal. He knows the labor situation is about the future of the game. He simply doesn’t have much future left.

During the lockout, he played for the Knights of Kladno, the Czech Extraliga club he came up with and now owns. He showed sparks of the brilliance that has made him first among active players in goals (665) and points (1,653). Still, it wasn’t the NHL.

When you’ve excelled at the rarified level that Jagr has, winning the Art Ross Trophy for most points in the regular season five times and a Stanley Cup twice, when you’ve won Olympic gold, you’ve probably accomplished all you set out to do.

If you’re still playing at 40 after all of the above, after labor problems that nearly destroyed the sport and left you jammed up against the start of an abbreviated season, there’s a reason other than the $4.5 million the Stars provided. Something personal.

Maybe just this: On the ice, thinking ahead, he still chases shadows.

“I’m not as good as I used to be, but I remember how I was,” he says. “I know I cannot reach it.”